Freeze on startup

I have a 1.8Ghz computer running 256MB RAM and Windows XP Home. My problem is that when i start up windows, almost every time it freezes when the Windows XP Home screen shows with the status bar. I asked a friend about this and he suggested it might be a hard disk error, so i downloaded SeaTools from Seagate’s website which found 3 bad sectors (which i deleted/overwrote in the hope this would fix the problem!!). However the file system scan failed. I am unsure what to do now, as i am constantly turning off the computer and rebooting to try and get it going (which can’t be good for the computer!!!)

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.